


Doomed Timelines and you- A myth-reality list

by ParadoxPotentia



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Author is not suicidal, Bad Ideas, Dimensional Destruction, Frequently repeated myths, Gen, If you are in a doomed timeline, Or if you're curious, Read This If You Want To Live, Replay Value AU, SBURB Guide, They just think it's not death if a copy remains, Worse Ideas, bad fanfiction, just mediocre, not even ironically or intentionally bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2016-03-30
Packaged: 2018-05-30 03:45:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6407416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxPotentia/pseuds/ParadoxPotentia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wondering how doomed timelines work? Probably not, unless you're Proportionaterequital. If you are, you've been managing to mix every kind of myth into one giant ball of wrong that is larger than the mass of all my timeclones. Hopefully this'll set you straight.</p><p>If you're not, please tell me what i did wrong, because i'll need every bit of help i can get to get him to actually listen.</p><p>[Replay Value Au, as per Godsgifttogrind's sburb glitch faq.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doomed Timelines and you- A myth-reality list

[Rangoon Warning: Intent correction. I know you can’t see it. That’s the problem, I manually replace my S’es with 7’s. It’s swapping them back.]

Also note some of this is overly summarized- the bottom line is generally accurate, or at least as much so as possible, but the middle could be completely and utterly wrong.

So, I’m going to assume you at least have passing familiarity with the game, right now. If you don’t, go do research or something, but that’s not my problem. What is my problem is doomed timelines.

I’ve made a lot of them. For whatever reason, the game loves handing me classes or aspects that can get themselves killed. A lot. I’m not talking double digits, here, I’m talking build yourself a planet out of your own rotten corpses. 

Some of them, I write angry letters for my time player to take back- whether I am the time player or not. Others, I perform experiments. Occasionally, I even make them for experiments. Usually I only do that in sessions where I hate everybody, though.

I had more memories of being timeline doomed, even before The Glitch[1] than your entire session, including every game construct. If hell is a place, I have sent so many copies of myself down there I expect I would have conquered it, had it not had all the other SBURB players of Time.

I’m pretty sure I’ve died more times that the entire population of my homeworld during the reckoning.

Is that sufficient credentials? If not, shut up and pipe down.

I will use Doom to refer to the state of being timeline doomed, while lowercase doom just means doom.

So, here’s some of the more common myths.

Myth: Doom from timelines stacks. A God teir of a pair of timeline doomed individuals is more doomed than an individual, a sprite from a doomed timeline that fuses with a doomed individual is more doomed than either alone, etcetera. 

Reality: Timeline Doom is a simple yes or no equation.  
I’d say think like a binary 1 or 0, but that’d be too complicated for the main person I’m writing this for, if not the rest of you. Doom is like a light switch. Either it’s on- in which case the game will try to kill you as quickly as possible within plausible deniability- or it’s off – in which case the game will no longer actively attempt to ensure your death, and will maintain normal levels of lethality, as per life in civilization centuries prior to SBURB. Well, SBURB levels, but passively trying to kill you.

Even when actively trying to kill you, plausible deniability means you won’t just mysterious contract head-exploded-itis. There will be a reason you died. This means more power, or predictive ability, increases your longevity, as you can’t be killed by most of the coincidences the game can throw. Do not get me wrong- if you are timeline doomed, you will die. You will just die later. All doom requires, though, is that you die before the game is won.

Some people talk about Dooms conflicting, but i haven't seen any evidence of that, besides sometimes corpse desecration, where a corpse is 'killed' again.

This said, the idea of stacking sprites with dozens of timeline doomed individuals, for all that it sounds amazing, isn’t.  
In a normal session, sprites survive. They vanish, sure, but they survive. This makes sense, as sprites can be anywhere from your level of power mid-game to on par with denizens, and their power is independent of their prototyping. Well… mostly, at least.

It takes a pretty serious threat to kill a sprite, and they must die. The conclusion is not a good one. We only survived that experiment because I was the Dame of Time, and I didn’t care how many times I timeline doomed us all. Half of us survived. I might have managed one more, if I didn’t hesitate.

Still, I survived to regret it. Better than my partner in crime. If you want an ultimate sprite, do it with a rain player. That’s safer. Not safe, but what is, when you use rain players?

Myth: Roleplay coefficients can apply doom, or are related to doom. “I avoided my doom by acting perfectly in tune with my role”, “I Timeline doomed myself by roleplaying badly”, “As a doom player I can change my roleplaying coefficient”, other plausible stories if you believe the myth.

Reality: Roleplay coefficients have nothing to do with capital D doom. They do have to do with lowercase d doom, though.

Imagine, if you would, if you decided to go skinny dipping in a volcano. Okay, no, that’s a bad metaphor. I’m leaving it in anyways, you can figure out how it would go.

Imagine, if you would, if you were fighting in a coliseum. If you have a bad roleplaying coefficient, you’re horribly out of shape, and still fighting the same opponent that you would with a good one. Conversely, if you have a great roleplaying coefficient, you’re in great shape, and will have a far easier time with the fight. The first one is a case of lowercase d doom. This can be avoided by roleplaying coefficient. Bad Roleplaying is stacking your deck against you through your own actions.

Uppercase D Doom is more like having an incurable lethal disease. You will die, all you can do is put it off as long as possible, while it cripples you further and further. The deck is being constantly stacked to kill you as quickly as possible, and all you can do is live one more day. You can’t win, but you can put off defeat for years, with enough power. You don’t have enough power.

Myth: Doom is applied to an individual.

Reality: Doom is applied to an area or timeline. I’ve never actually seen any evidence that people on the pre-sburb civilization are doomed before entering sburb, but drag them into sburb and they always die, so clearly they all have the doomed flag. I assume that we don’t because we came from sburb’s area initially, not because our planet only exists by paradox. Every method of determining if someone is doomed implicated everyone in the timeline who met up with us. It’s why we call them doomed timelines, not doomed individuals. [2]

Obviously, if you stop being that individual but still come from that timeline, you’re still doomed, while if you continue being that individual but come from a different timeline, you’re safe.

The worrying part here is this- wherever the doomed flag comes from, it overrides the safe flag. For most players, this is fine- but even if you can, for all that is either from the angels or the others, DO NOT LET A RAIN PLAYER TRAVEL IN TIME. Any dupliclone memory transfer can transfer the doomed status, with an ~80% rate of occurrence. Sure, the other 20% saved the doomed individual, but 80% failure isn’t good. Thankfully, god teir will cure it. Unfortunately, for those who already are, it’s the only thing that will, besides the usual timeline doomed cure of destroying the doomed reality. Those cures are fun, if you can manage them.

I wonder whatever happened to PotentiaParadox? Message me if you’ve seen xyr around, please. I know they say it’s best to avoid contact with yourself, but xe had so many wonderful ideas that I didn’t. I don't know if they made it out of the session, though.

Myth: If you’re not timeline doomed, you will survive.

Reality: Nope. It just means you can survive without having to jump through a lot more hoops before it even becomes theoretically possible. It means luck no longer considers a quick and painless death to be the best outcome. It means the game won’t suddenly get amazingly picky about roleplaying, and demand constant status within your role.

Myth: Doom sets luck to the lowest possible value.

Reality: Nope. You’d think that, given how light players are no better, and often worse, at surviving these timelines that other players, but no.

Doom instead changes all luck checks. Luck already favors ‘the best possible outcome’ in the short term with your actions. The game now declares this is ‘dying painlessly’, followed by ‘not dying’. As such, the light player may die faster or slower, but it’ll end with less screaming than the rest of you. This is not quite what you want, but minimizing your luck value just means you’ll die more painfully, so don’t bother with changing your luck stat. Focus on more important things, such as destroying your universe so you’re not doomed any longer.

Myth: Anyone who escapes the scratch is doomed.

Reality: Nope. You’d think they should be- they have no point of origin anymore, but… Remember how I compared doom to a light switch? The default setting, unless you acquire the doom flag, is safe. It doesn’t ask, “Is this individual from an undoomed reality”, it asks “are they from a doomed reality”.

SBURB is inconsistent even about paradoxes. What else is new.

Myth: Revival methods can cure doom.

Reality: No revival skill can cure doom. There are two abilities, though, that can rarely cure doom. 

[Unlabled], from v, (you know what I mean, trying to avoid triggering the protection), cures doomed players- but it also immediately kills you. Fun. Apparently, it removes all of a certain set of flags- including one that means “alive”. Yes, this means that if you’re in a doomed timeline, you can kill everyone with ease if you're a v player. No, if won’t remove the doomed flag unless you’re in a non-doomed timeline. (Well, it will, but it’ll be reapplied.) 

[Encore] shows up rarely on life players. It doesn’t remove doom. It kills you and creates what amounts to a dupliclone, as per a rain player, of your alpha timeline player with all your memories and knowledge. This satisfies the doom flag, as your origins now come from the alpha timeline. It is also an amazingly horrible way to die. I mean, both me’s were non-functional from the pain for a week, and even now, anytime anyone even says the E word, I wince. However, you will rejoin the alpha timeline player as a single entity when you restart.

Myth: Doom can make some skills stop working, or backfire. Didn’t you say the game tries to maintain plausible deniability?

Reality: Those skills always had a tiny chance of backfiring. [Portrait] can cause temporary immobility, [Noirscape] always could double the effects of prototyping on all Agent and lower ranking enemies, though that’s only one in 4^4^4^4 times, without luck factored in. [Moonsetter] has a one in (8^8)^8 chance of summoning both the Prospit and Derse moons to your location, and far too rapidly for anyone short of a space player to save you. This destroys the moons, because sanity is not something that SBURB has. I’m sure there are others, but these are the main three I’ve seen. Yes, I’ve seen [Moonsetter] used in an alpha timeline. Let’s just say Thieves of Luck are not something you want going PK on you, or to go PK on.

Most of these seem to be puns. If you can see a pun way for it to backfire, it will probably backfire in that way. Time skills don’t seem to have drawbacks, probably because the time player is supposed to fix the fuck-up. I’m not a good time player.

Myth: [Seranade] does nothing.

Reality: [Seranade] only works if you’re doomed. It stuns all doomed individuals within an area. Well, I say stuns. I mean you get caught up in singing love songs to ‘death’, about how much you love death or other romantic musings about death. Most are really bittersweet. Mine… isn’t. Dying is my favorite hobby, after all. I’m told that it was supposed to trigger love songs to ‘Your Beloved’ if you had the “undoomed” flag. 

Unfortunately, that programmer assumed that the ‘undoomed’ state was a separate flag, [3] not a state of being not doomed, so instead it checks elsewhere- specifically, the fourth bit of Midnight Calliope. Midnight Calliope, which is set to 0 on all non-bugged classes. Any checks-to-nowhere point there, for some reason.

This means if you’re a clown of stars, you can tell us what it does. Of course, with how buggy clowns are, I don’t think it’d be reliable, but whatever.

Myth: Boons stop working in the main timeline if you can/do initiate the scratch in the doomed timeline.

Reality: Boons still work. However, if you have the tiniest chance of surviving to escape the scratch- or dying in a scratch- you will need to pay. Not much, but something.

Myth: Doomed timelines are bad.

Reality: Doomed timelines are bad by most people’s definition of bad, but deliberately making them can be very useful, as it enables more denizen boons and allies to fight for you. Sure, they’ll die rapidly and almost always inevitably, but- there’s nothing quite like keeping an eye on the prophecies, knowing which ones require X to survive, then killing them if you don’t like how things went. This is obviously most effective if they don’t realize you’re planning on doing it. Also, suicide isn’t an option, but excessive recklessness is. Like, say, casting bridge of stars with your destination as the most dangerous thing in the session. Obviously, it works best if both parties fighting’s survival is foreordained, since then if they kill you you’ve succeeded in making a doomed timeline anyways. On that note, fuck [Ocean Star Falling].

Of course, this is all immoral as heaven if you have any ethics, but what the hell, you lost those when you played the game, rather than dying like the rest of the chaff. You lost those when you became a part of the game, rejecting your land of ‘Birth’, because that is what it was, before you performed ectobiology. You lost those when you killed your first carapacian, imp or otherwise. These are not ethics, these are their crouching corpse, the shell secreted around it. If you choose to break the shell, you'll be evil, but even before that, you were never really good.

WARNING: This will make your death Just in the doomed timeline, and almost certainly in the Alpha too, and in the unlikely case it's not Just, it'll be Heroic. If they aren't perma-dead, it's just not worth it.

Myth: There is no way to restore a doomed timeline.

Reality: [Future me- Nope this is a terrible idea. maybe ask the denziens themselves? it almost certainly won't work, but maybe it's an option? or, ofc, mass-casting encore with timeline manipulation. Also, completely wrong. learn ~ATH, past me. or at least set some doomed-selves on it when they aren't busy dying!] Maybe there is. If you can get the denizen to change the code, or change it yourself- ‘already damn near impossible’- you can stick a comma where it checks if paradox > 0.0, so instead it checks if paradox > 0,0.  
For some reason, 0,0 == infinity, because why should this code make sense.

If you do this exactly right, you can probably remove the doom from the timeline, while leaving the timeline intact. It also seems to orphan the timeline though, as the data stopped during my attempt.  
Still, this isn’t practical, and could rip the timeline to shreds or otherwise cause huge issues, especially by some of the theories of how SBURB works. For all intents and purposes, this myth is accurate.

I hope I got all of the myths. If I have made any mistakes, please feel free to correct me. If there’s anything else you’ve heard about these, please leave a comment. If you would like to kill me slowly and painfully, get in line. One timeclone per person, etc. etc.

Footnotes:

[1] The Glitch was a session where I was the Reign of Time. Except it was apparently actually spelled Rain of time. The consorts were convinced that our session had five players, despite that there were four of us and none of the listed were a Reign of Time. It had a mist player, just to make everything more confusing.

[2] Correction by anabacticCoder- it's a flag, not a tag. 

[3] The assumption isn't actually on the code's behalf, but rather another piece of code is supposed to invert un and non tag's values. It doesn't work, so the code goes to garbage data. see comments for his/her/xyr/their explanation/

Eventually it got fixed.


End file.
